Hi, sorry I haven’t updated in a while! Ha ha, that’s a joke that’s only funny to people who’ve read blogs for a long time.

Please find me elsewhere on the internet. I have a tinyletter now, as do we all, as well as an Instagram and a Twitter. I don’t think I will ever update this particular blog again, but its archives will reside here in perpetuity, links mostly unbroken, until I get too disorganized to pay the hosting fee or my ancient unupdatable version of Wordpress dissolves or the world experiences a techpocalypse that destroys the whole internet for good, goddess willing.

This was a fun blog for many years. We had a time. I love all the readers and commenters, except all the ones who told me to go kill myself circa 2007-11. This is definitely not goodbye, it’s just a change of venue.

2. in honor of a beloved cat whose name sounded similar and whose nickname sounded, let’s face it, identical

3. At what would turn out to be my third to last regular weekly appointment with my midwives, Karen (one of the two midwives) listened to his heart and there was something weird about the heartbeat. We all heard it: a sort of a lull between beats every few beats, or maybe they became too close together during that lull, it was hard to tell. It hadn’t been there a week ago. I was full term; if there was something wrong, we all knew (but did not discuss) that he would have to be delivered that day and would maybe immediately have to have some kind of surgery done on his tiny heart. Karen called a pediatric cardiologist and asked if we could come in right away, and we could. I dressed in one of my two remaining garments that fit (the midwives come to your house, so I had been in pajamas) and we put on our shoes. Karen drove us the three blocks to the G train to save time. We had decided to take the G to the L because it is faster than taking a car to 14th and 7th Ave, our destination, but that wait for the G train — a wait I have done so many countless times over the course of the last decade of my G train-adjacent life — was one of the worst moments of my life. I thought about what I had in my bag and how ridiculous it would be if this was the bag I would have with me in the hospital. I didn’t even have a book! We planned to give birth at home, so I had never thought about packing a hospital bag, it had seemed like a jinx. Keith said something to me about the baby and he used the joke name we’d been calling him, the placeholder we’d been using until we landed on something that seemed actually right. “THAT’S NOT HIS NAME,” I said and burst into tears. A name seemed so important all of a sudden, like it could tether our baby to us and to life.

The sonogram or EKG or whatever took ten hundred thousand silent years of first a technician and then the doctor pushing HARD into my navel with the wand in order to get the thing as close as possible to the baby’s chest, inside me. We stared at the screen with no idea of what we should be seeing or hearing. The doctor finally told us that the arrythmia was arterial (which is ok) as opposed to ventricular (which is not) and that he was okay with me delivering at home, even if it was still there at my next appointment with the midwives, even if it was still there in labor.

And it was: every time Martine (the other midwife) or her assistant Shana checked, while I was in labor, I could hear it, that skipped beat. But it didn’t get worse or different and his heart sounded so strong the whole time, even when I had been trying and failing to get his head out for another ten hundred thousand definitely not silent years, he was still right there, patiently waiting to be born, and then finally he was. My last scream merged with his first scream but a few seconds later we were all laughing. He looked so funny, a little conehead alien covered in goo! Was this my baby? Who was he?

A few minutes or hours later it was time for Martine to examine him so he left me for the first time ever and went a few feet away, to the end of the bed, to be weighed and measured and to have his heart listened to and Martine said the arrhythmia was gone, or at least that she couldn’t hear it. When she checked again a couple of days later, and then Shana checked a couple of days after that, it still wasn’t there. We have another appointment with the cardiologist next week and it will be horrible but the arrhythmia still won’t be there. I am totally sure.

The name Raphael, according to what I’m sure is a very reliable internet baby name website, means “God has healed.” I remember coming across this item of information several months ago while searching for R names that weren’t terrible while looking at my phone and eating a summer roll in Hanco’s; when I read those words I remember feeling inexplicably moved. I didn’t think anything of it at the time because pregnant = “inexplicably moved” constantly by the dumbest and most random shit. But during our five days of name deliberation after the baby was born I remembered the meaning and told Keith. I said “You’re going to hate this, but” and then I told him. Neither of us is a big God person, especially not Keith, though I am often susceptible to superstition. But to my surprise he didn’t hate it, and just like that, we finally had a name for our son. A week after he was born, we told my parents and Martine, who could then file his birth certificate.

It’s taking a minute to get used to (I have caught myself saying the joke placeholder) but I try to practice, I can practice right now because I hear him calling from the bedroom, not loudly, just making me aware that it’s been a minute since we last talked. Hi Raphael. Hi Raffi. I’m right here, your crazy mom who partly named you after a cat. I will change your diaper and feed you. I will love you with all of my heart and soul forever.

I feel like it’s bad juju to have the top post here be one that’s so negative about pregnancy so I am setting out to write something positive about pregnancy before it’s over. A terrifying fact: it will be over soon! I was in denial about this until recently, but now it’s impossible to ignore. Mostly because I am aware of walking around all the time with what is incontrovertibly a baby inside my body — a tiny baby, still, but not so small that it couldn’t, if absolutely necessary, live outside me. Luckily there is almost no chance that the baby will have to do that, but still, a due date is not like other deadlines. You can’t ask a baby for an extension. Even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want to. A lifetime of procrastinating and doing everything at the last minute has prepared me very badly for this situation. I still haven’t purchased one single baby-related item, though many have been given to me. Tiny kimonos and 3 different gently used cosleepers are great but if my baby is born even a little bit early there is a chance I will still not have gotten around to buying, say, diapers.

Jesus, I sound so crazy. My baby my baby my baby. It’s unavoidable, though. I used to think this post was hilarious but now I’m like fuck you Choire, what kind of asshole wouldn’t be in a tailspin of anxiety all the time re: some facet of having a new baby? It’s a FUCKING BABY.

Anyway: back to trying to counterbalance my previous bad attitude about the alienating, identity-obliterating experience of incubating a human. Well, for starters, I have to feel grateful for how relatively easy it has been for me so far. Early on I thought that that pregnancy was going to completely destroy my body and brain and leave me a shell of a human in an outfit I didn’t recognize, but it turns out I was just bloated from water retention and depressed from abstaining from coffee. In reality, as soon as I shelled out for one good pair of maternity jeans (J brand, via Ebay) and the Storq people sent me a Bundle and I started drinking coffee again, everything pretty much went back to normal. It helped when the generalized bloat resolved itself into a localized lump that could be accommodated and accessorized. I can still wear a lot of my regular clothes because I have always avoided clothes with a defined waistline anyway. As an added bonus, the back pain that was also ruining my mental weather in my first trimester mostly went away when I returned to regular yoga practice, taking the fear that the pain would worsen incrementally with every pound I gained with it. My second trimester was actually pretty dreamy. And I got a lot done, too, though not as much writing as I’d hoped. Instead, I launched a new podcast and, with Ruth, raised $40K via Kickstarter to rebuild and otherwise reboot Emily Books. I still feel like a failure for not finishing even a partial draft of a new novel during this time. Sometime around maybe 22 weeks I voiced this goal to my new therapist (who specializes in you’re-a-mom-now) and she said, so tactfully, so delicately, “I don’t really understand how things work in your industry — that seems like it could be a realistic goal, but is it?” And I was like “I’ve done it before!” I guess it was one of those things that I needed to tell myself. I could still make it to my word count goal if I write twice as much as I’ve written up until this point between now and when the baby comes. This seems incompatible with fulfilling the Kickstarter rewards and doing the podcast and buying those diapers (diapers are understood here to be a symbol for like 1000 random things) but you never know.

Most importantly, though, I have a better attitude about, you know, the actual baby. Of course I still feel terrified of the first stretch, which people like to terrify you about. Being in charge of 100% of someone else’s needs around the clock might be someone’s idea of a good time but it is not mine. But the people who are telling me the horror stories of their baby’s first three months on earth tend to be alive and fairly intact, so there’s that. And I do also feel, in a way that was just too abstract to feel before, excited to meet my baby. Like, the idea that he is a person who will exist, who I will soon meet and spend time with, is still insane, but it’s also thrilling. He won’t be other people’s babies, and in some ways will be inferior and defective, just like how I myself am in some ways inferior and defective. But he’ll be mine, so I’ll love him. I know: duh! But it’s all the revelation I have time for today. The library is about to close, and I have to go get something to eat.

“Carpet is Mungers” is an influential (influential on me, certainly) essay by Meghan Daum from her 2001 essay collection My Misspent Youth. It would probably take you less time to read it than for me to sum it up, and you should read it, if you haven’t. I think about it a lot. I believe it’s one of the essays in that book that leads people to leave aggrieved Amazon reviews that call the author selfish and shallow and “very, very young.” Basically, you are either someone who gets it or you don’t. If you don’t, god bless, enjoy your carpeted existence. If you get it, “Carpet is Mungers” explains everything. It’s about how seemingly meaningless aesthetic details, like wall to wall carpeting in a rented apartment, can make Daum feel “‘other’ to her own self,” fundamentally divorced from something crucial about her identity.

I’m not saying there’s something good about being, like me or like Daum, a Carpet is Mungers person. It’s inconvenient and hard to explain, and there is something sad — simultaneously snobby and overreaching –about it; as Daum so ably explains, it’s much less about being “classy” than about being highly attuned to details that connote a fantasy of a specific kind of classiness. But the cool thing about this essay is that it’s not a judgment, it’s a diagnosis, and this is a condition that I have. And I was strongly conscious of having it today in the changing room at the Mashpee Commons Gap as I tried on four on-sale items from the maternity section.

The problem was not the Gap, really, or being in the suburbs; Gaps are the same here as they are in NYC (except much less crowded and sloppy). I’m not too cool for the Gap and even though the Gap is probably Mungers by a strict Daumian definition I don’t feel un-myself there. The Gap reminds me of a whole set of positive associations; Bennett worked at the Gap in high school and college and I often visited him there; I even sort of associate the Gap Smell (whatever it is, their particular sizing chemicals) with him, and Bennett is one of my oldest most familiar friends, basically the anti-Mungers.

No, the problem was me. As I prepared to try on jeans that are just like my ordinary Gap Leggings Jeans, but with two little elastic panels at the waist that will make it possible for me to wear them buttoned, which is no longer possible with my ordinary pair, I got a look at myself in the dressing room mirror and just felt like, whoa, who the fuck is that?

I was wearing the North Face jacket I bought last year on the eve of the blizzard, which is mega dorky. Unlike all the brightly colored, stylish, thrift store “vintage” outerwear I’ve worn over the years, it actually keeps my torso and limbs warm when it’s cold out, but there is nothing else to recommend it. Until this winter, though, I hadn’t regretted it. I’d even joked about it, that it was my “mom coat,” a joke that seemed funnier last winter, when the idea of actually being a prot0-mom in this coat seemed like science fiction. On the bright side, in a few more weeks I will be too fat to wear it! But today, in the mirror, it contributed mightily to the impression that I was a thirtysomething white woman with glasses and a slightly unwashed ponytail who was wearing leggings out of the house, leggings tucked into sheepskin boots that, while they are heeled and not the “classic” model, might be recognizable to the trained eye as Uggs. How did this happen to me? I thought. Slowly, I guess, and then all at once.

I tried on the jeans, feeling bulky and unwieldy, trying to avoid eye contact with my mottled pink legs in the mirror. They fit and so I got cocky and tried on the other things, which included another pair of jeans that are for much pregnant-er women, the kind that have a huge beige panel of elastic instead of a waistband and are really only “jeans” because the manufacturer can’t call them something more accurate, such as “denim-colored sack for your flesh.” I tore them off so fast I almost broke them. Then I put on my own familiar leggings and tried on the tops, which I had only bothered with because they were $11. They were both the kind of garment that I like to wear while not pregnant: plaid and somewhat voluminous. The recent redistribution of my torso meat has rendered this genre of shirt off-limits to me, I now realize. Something about the breadth of my shoulders and the new farm-animal-ish quality of my chest renders these smocky things unflattering to the point of disturbing on me, like I am trying to camoflage myself as a plaid item of furniture, perhaps so I can spy on something taking place in a Man Cave.

I understood suddenly why new moms sometimes dye their hair pink or get new tattoos. In the moment of standing there in the changing room with that heinous smock on, I wanted to get a new tattoo on my face. IMMEDIATELY.

I mean, it’s okay. It’s no big deal. I know that as alien and gross and distant from myself as I feel right now, and even given how dramatically these feelings are bound to increase, I will get through this strange time and come back to feeling like “myself” eventually, if probably a bit stretched-out. I will also likely find clothes to wear for the next six months that don’t make me feel like Kim Kardashian at the 2013 Met Gala. But in that moment I thought again, as I have often thought lately, of all the women throughout history and right now who’ve felt these awful ways but with the crucial difference of not wanting to be pregnant, and who have been forced to stay trapped in rebellious, alien bodies by laws made by men who think they understand everything that’s at stake.

Those women’s plight is a state far beyond Mungers; it certainly puts the ordinary Mungers-ness of pregnancy in perspective. Still and all, though. The mindfuck aspect of these changes is supra-puberty-level and not for the faint of heart. It’s lucky for men that they can’t do this; they would not be able to handle it for one second.

On October 4th I had a karaoke “bachelorette party.” We ate sushi and drank mezcal like it was water and I bought a pack of cigarettes that I didn’t remember buying the next day. On the 6th I went with my friend Tom to see the Bangles in front-row seats at City Winery, where we drank prosecco and red wine and I ate a cheese and meat plate pretty much by myself.* The Bangles were even more amazing than I assumed they would be; they are a living advertisement for doing what you love and probably also for living the good life in California. They played Hero Takes a Fall, their cover of September Gurls, and, as an encore, Walk Like An Egyptian, which was one of those “I didn’t even realize this was on my bucket list!” moments, even though I was disappointed to learn that they don’t whistle. They go “doot doot doot doot.” I smoked the last of the cigarettes that I’d bought on Saturday on the walk home from the C train. The next morning my period was a full week late, so I took a pregnancy test and waited two minutes for the result. It showed up just as Keith was walking out the door to go to work. I thought of asking him to wait but then thought probably I should take a few more tests before involving him in my worries. The x had been faint, and the test had been in my drawer for forever.

When something’s too intense and mindfucking to approach head-on I usually find some pressing way to distract myself, and lucky for me that day I had a coffee date with a UK editor and a drinks date with a friend from the Internet, neither of whom I’d met before, plus assorted work and wedding-related errands all over the city. But as I went about my day I managed to buy and take two more pregnancy tests. The first was in a Starbucks bathroom and someone was banging on the door even before I’d finished peeing, so I put it in my purse before it registered a result, and when I took it out later to read it it said “ERROR” (I’d shelled out for the fancy digital kind). The second was in a tiny nail salon bathroom and, mindful of the previous ERROR, I kept it level on the back of the toilet sat with it, mindlessly noodling with my phone until it was ready to read. This one said “3-4 WEEKS PREGNANT.” I left the nail salon and walked out onto 25th Street, pregnant. In 15 minutes I was supposed to meet Keith at Macy’s to look at some wedding rings that were on sale and convince him that despite the sale we really did not want Macy’s wedding rings, so I walked up 7th Avenue, in the rush hour crush of that awful stretch, in the last of the day’s sunlight, thinking — as far as I can remember — zero thoughts but a long, slow, perpetual refrain of “Whaaaaat theeeee fuuuuuuuuuuck?”

It’s hard to explain how thrilled and horrified and also just numb and weird I felt that day. On the one hand, I have been thinking in abstract terms about having a baby for forever. I am weirdly well-versed in the literature of birth, inspired half by feminism and half by a taste for sensationalistic body horror. I also have long revered the work of Ayun Halliday, whose East Village Inky zine has always made having kids as an artist on a budget seem more ‘madcap adventure’ than ‘depression-stoking death trap.’ But in my late 20s, when my work was going especially badly/nonexistently and I was spending most of my days in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood surrounded by fancy, very carefree-seeming moms and babies, I thought about having a baby all the time in a really gross, jealous way. I developed a dismissive attitude, rooted in and coupled with envy, about a kind of idealized domesticity that in my dumb brain was totally disassociated from the hard terrifying realities of childbirth and parenthood. I thought of having children the way my Friendship character Amy does — as a prize you’re awarded when you’ve attained other totems of adulthood and stability. I thought that’s what babies were to other people, anyway. To the extent that I, at 28, thought that I wanted to have a baby, what I really wanted was to be one of those people: rich, stable, settled-down, stylish people who ate in the Oysters/Kale Salad/Skirt Steak/Deconstructed Classic Dessert restaurants in our neighborhood whenever they felt like it, with their perfect 6 month olds snoozing in a $900 stroller alongside their table.

In the intervening years, I stopped living in an imagined fantasy future and got busier inhabiting the life I was actually living, and I gradually became better at various aspects of living that real life. Also, my friends began to have babies, and I experienced their joy and worry firsthand. It was nothing like what I’d imagined. I realized that no one, not even the shallowest person imaginable, would go through what parents go through in order to follow the rules or produce a badge of bourgie success. I watched my friends fall in love with their kids. I loved their kids. I got better at letting myself love other people and accept their love (gross, sappy, but undoubtedly true — this, for me, was the “prize” at the end of the obstacle course that I encountered in my late 20s and early 30s.)

On the other hand, WHAT THE FUCK. Ok, sure, I wasn’t young, and I wasn’t (completely) broke, and I was about to get married to my favorite possible human- on paper, the circumstances seemed, while not 100% ideal, vastly more ideal than they’d ever been at any point during my previous 17 years of potential-pregnancy. But still, was I grown-up enough to be in charge of having a baby, who would go on to become a child, who would be my child FOREVER? I love being alone. (LOVE IT.) I want to write more books. I want to make Emily Books a bigger, more profitable, enduring business. And I still haven’t figured out how to write books and make enough money to live in the city that has non-negotiably become the only home I can imagine, as readers of literally anything I’ve ever written already know. Why would I throw into my own path the biggest possible obstacle to achieving any of those goals? Why would I just let my body make that decision for me, when it was clearly such a terrifying and bad one?

I spotted Keith across the street, standing outside Macy’s, and had that nice moment of recognizing someone you love among all of the random people in the crowd, and seeing them before they see you. We went inside the store and looked at the rings, which looked like wedding rings, but couldn’t get anyone to help us try them on or whatever so I convinced Keith that we should go to Catbird, where we later found perfect (comparably inexpensive) rings. On the sidewalk outside Macy’s, he asked me how my day’d been and I told him, I don’t remember how, that I was pregnant. I also don’t remember what he said, though I think he said “Really?” a few times because he genuinely thought that I was fucking with him. But once he realized that I wasn’t kidding I just remember his face, like, I had never in my life made anyone so happy before. We probably kissed. The sidewalk was still crowded. I was like “Ok, come on,” and we started walking towards the subway. He tried to get me to let him carry my purse, which was not heavy. We wound through the maze of tunnels and waited on the packed platform and got on the subway with everyone else, all the other people who were doing totally ordinary, totally extraordinary things that day and every moment of all of our lives.

*a very nice nurse midwife who has had this conversation a lot later had to reassure me that at that point the “baby” is as big as the period at the end of this sentence and can basically go one of two ways — implant in the cushy wall of your uterus or nah –and so alcohol etc. can’t damage it. Phew!

I spent an hour and a half on the phone yesterday with a very nice and sort of understanding call center employee doing a settlement on one of three credit cards, none of which I have spent any money on for well over a year and none of which I’ve made any payments on for several months. Did you know that you can stop using and also more crucially stop paying all your credit cards, then call them up at some later date (but not too much later because they’ll start suing you) and offer them some % of the money you owe them, then bargain and haggle until they accept that that’s all the money they’re ever going to get from you, and then you pay them and it’s done? I had no idea this was possible either until I did it. I sort of found this out by accident. I would not actually recommend it as a course of action if there are any other options available to you. For one thing, it makes you feel like the scum of the fucking earth.

For another, it completely ruins your credit, obviously. But for me this last-resort approach to debt was what it took for me to stop using my credit cards and accept that I won’t be able to use credit for a long time. Knowing that there was no back-up plan was the only thing that has ever been able to coerce me into actually living within my means, which I still interpret to mean “spending every penny I make” but at least I am no longer spending more. I don’t really want to use writing about this as an opportunity to beat myself up for making mistakes because I’ve done that a lot already. I can work on changing but some of the work has to also be about not denying who I am, which is a person who fundamentally loves to spend money. Not in a hoardery way, not in a shopaholic way, but in a much more insidious and also, to my mind, way more fun way that involves *just not ever thinking about money.* Most of my money is spent on snacks and treats and delicious groceries for meals for my friends. I buy presents and experiences, stuff that makes life fun and exciting and glamorous and livable, $4 iced teas and in-season farmer’s market produce. The only problem with this approach is that all the day-to-day *not thinking about money* gets concentrated in these big apocalyptic sessions of *being forced to think about nothing but money, and in the worst possible way.* Finding a way towards moderation is the goal. Supposedly the story of my life is about learning how to see a spectrum of options rather than black and white extremes. (From an astrological perspective.) (I also spend money on astrology.)

I had been told that the settlement call would take ten minutes so that’s how much time I’d budgeted, and after procrastinating about the call all day I finally picked up the phone at about the same time I was supposed to be arriving for a book party in Manhattan. One of the things the call center employee did, probably following a corporate protocol, was to put me on hold repeatedly while she discussed my “situation” with her “colleagues.” The hold music was so much even worse than what you’re imagining: a tinny loop of the same two bars of upbeat jazz that would not have passed muster as a ringtone in 1999. By the way, I am borrowing money to pay this settlement from a lender who specializes in lending money at semi-usurious but not-as-usurious-as-credit-card rates to people with busted credit, but I couldn’t say that, so I said I was borrowing the money from an uncle who I made up on the spot. When she said she couldn’t get her colleagues to come down any lower than 60% of the total amount I owed, I put her on hold to discuss this with my uncle. Actually I used the opportunity to brush my teeth and change out of a sweaty tshirt into a reliable black dress I’ve owned since 2008. I got back on the line and announced that my uncle could not possibly lend me that much money, that the very most I could talk him into was an amount that represented 40% of the total amount owed. This was the most I’d been approved for by the lender so I was actually telling the truth, in a way. I also found myself telling the truth when explaining the “hardship” that had led to my being unable to pay my credit cards in the first place. “There have been a lot of changes in my industry that have made it much more difficult to make the amount of money it was once possible to make.” “It sounds like you really care about your work and are doing your best in a tough industry,” said the call center employee. I don’t know if she was required to say this or was being sincere. She also at one point said “It’s good you have family who can help you,” in a way that could have sounded bitchy, or like she knew I was lying, but that actually sounded wistful and real.

This intimate conversation with a call center stranger took much longer than I’d anticipated and culminated in a standoff when I thought the entire thing would be for naught because they refused to fax the letter I needed in order to get the money (from my “uncle”) but eventually I won. After thanking this woman, my tormentor, who is probably also tormented herself, who certainly did not seem like she in any way wanted to be working in a call center, profusely, I ordered up an Uber so I could catch the last 10 minutes of the party. It cost $19.61. Money well spent. Also, afterwards, I took a subway and a bus to get home and cooked dinner instead of getting takeout even though that meant eating at midnight, so maybe there is hope for me yet.

My essay “Into The Woods,” excerpted from a collection edited by Chad Harbach called MFA vs NYC, was posted last week on Medium. This happened because I insisted that the essay be published somewhere besides in the collection; it’s the only formally structured and edited piece of first-person writing I’ve produced in the last four years and I wanted to make sure people read it. During the six months I spent writing it and then the time I spent on final revisions prior to the book’s production deadline a year later, my life changed dramatically. Writing the essay was part of that change.

I didn’t feel, as I felt with some of the essays in ATHSW, that I was exorcising something by writing, and I didn’t feel, as I did with Friendship, that I was initiating something by writing, inviting something in. Instead I felt almost the same way I do when I force myself to do some kind of organizational task or rote exercise that doesn’t come naturally to me, like figuring out how to make an Excel spreadsheet. Writing this essay felt like learning, like forcing myself to learn. I feel less like change happened to me and more like I changed myself.

One of the most crucial changes is that since January 2013 I’ve been working full-time in an office (two different offices, but the same one since July.) A few weeks ago I took the day off work and went up to New Hampshire to speak to an undergraduate creative writing class at Southern New Hampshire University.

It was a freewheeling discussion of fiction and I’m sure I said a lot of nonsensical things about how writing fiction is best accomplished, but I did think I was useful as an emissary of “how New York works and how different publishing models work and how to think of your career in terms of money.” Being the foremost expert on this stuff that many of these students had ever encountered felt like a big responsibility. I did the best I could. And then afterwards a student emailed me (I’d told the students to feel free to email me.)

Her email was great and very honest. She said she was worried about not being able to make a living as a writer, and her own worrying-prone nature would prevent her from taking the leaps of faith necessary to leading the life she thinks she wants. She wanted to know whether I thought getting an MFA or working in publishing would help her get better at writing and/or help her get published.

This is the letter I wrote back.

I vividly remember being your age, about to graduate, and asking myself and other people all the same questions. Looking back, I regret the time I spent worrying about how on earth I was going to be a writer and make a living, when it was so clear that the odds were stacked against me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a valid concern.

I don’t need to be the billionth person who tells you that most writers don’t make their whole living from their writing. For example: I don’t!

I have in the past, though, and that was great, but doing other stuff besides writing can be good too — for your life, your mental health, and even … for your writing. How else will you get the experiences of the world and other people and relationships that you need in order to reimagine them in fiction or memoir? The key is just to find work that won’t steal all your energy and kill your spirit. This is hard, and takes time, but you will find it eventually if you keep trying.

Definitely don’t worry about not being good enough. Work in publishing if publishing is interesting to you. Get an MFA if you love workshop classes and school. If those things aren’t interesting and fun, don’t do them. If something else is, do that! Follow your curiosity and your (sorry to be cheesy) heart. Pretend that you’re sure of yourself, even when you’re not, and you will learn to trust yourself. Don’t wait around for other people to give you permission to do what you want, or to say you’re “good enough.” You’ll waste time waiting that you could be writing, having fun, learning, and living.

I am pretty proud of the advice I gave her. I am trying to take it myself. Some days, I succeed.